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It's a sad story about the state of Qt Creator's plugin API. In any case, I kind of agree with the author here that QtCreator basically peaked in both usabilit

It's a sad story about the state of Qt Creator's plugin API. In any case, I kind of agree with the author here that QtCreator basically peaked in both usability and performance somewhere around Qt Creator 3.4 . I would even say 3.3 since that's when it could no longer be built with Qt 4. The biggest problem with such older versions of QtCreator is however the internal C++ parser limitations, e.g. poor 'auto' support. The outdated C++ parser is the main reason I had to stop using old QtC -- at some point, the parsing is so bad that Find Usages stops being reliable. Any clang based replacement is just 100x slower and tends to have even worse support of recovering from parse errors than the internal parser. I ponder what the author's using -- I can't guess from the screenshots.

pixelesque 4y ago
I agree too on the peak being 3.3 or so - I'm still using 3.3.2 on my Intel Linux machines - unfortunately on my main new AMD machine I had to move to newer versions due to core plugin crashes in older versions in order to get it to run, and the Build Kit infrastructure is just a mess there IMO (I know it was added to allow flexibility, but I never needed that functionality, I wanted one debug build for use in an IDE, and I'd build release / deploy stuff outside of the IDE). The main annoyance I had with older QtCreator versions was that you couldn't actually text edit CMakeLists.txt files in the editor, it would treat them as Project files regardless of how you tried to open them, so had to use an external editor for those files, which seems a bit silly. It's been my main C++ dev IDE since 2010, but I'm starting to think about moving to VSCode, but not really happy with that either for editing (in either C/C++ or Rust with RustAnalyzer, but I find it good for Python and JS): auto-indent is very primitive and rarely does the right thing, and tooltip popups for hints and errors just seem random and inconsistent to me. It's functional though, but I wouldn't say great compared to my QtCreator experience of just very fluently typing out large amounts of code the way I want it.
- zerr 4y ago
  Why not KDevelop?
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Kdevelop is/was good, it became unstable/unusable for a long time though when they upgraded KDE, though. Also, project file formats, e.g. if you have .vsproj or .pro files you can't always just use another IDE.
Rochus 4y ago
> the internal C++ parser limitations, e.g. poor 'auto' support I'm considering updating the internal C++ parser, which is written by Roberto Raggi, by a more recent version, but it's not my top priority.
- arka2147483647 4y ago
  I have read somewhere that it would be possible to use libclang to parse C++. I have no experience on this, but perhaps you should look into it?
  - Rochus 4y ago
    Yes, there is even a clang plugin which I could migrate, but it - of course - requires clang and llvm, which is big and not particularly fast (as noted by AshamedCaptain).

pixelesque 4y ago

I agree too on the peak being 3.3 or so - I'm still using 3.3.2 on my Intel Linux machines - unfortunately on my main new AMD machine I had to move to newer versions due to core plugin crashes in older versions in order to get it to run, and the Build Kit infrastructure is just a mess there IMO (I know it was added to allow flexibility, but I never needed that functionality, I wanted one debug build for use in an IDE, and I'd build release / deploy stuff outside of the IDE). The main annoyance I had with older QtCreator versions was that you couldn't actually text edit CMakeLists.txt files in the editor, it would treat them as Project files regardless of how you tried to open them, so had to use an external editor for those files, which seems a bit silly. It's been my main C++ dev IDE since 2010, but I'm starting to think about moving to VSCode, but not really happy with that either for editing (in either C/C++ or Rust with RustAnalyzer, but I find it good for Python and JS): auto-indent is very primitive and rarely does the right thing, and tooltip popups for hints and errors just seem random and inconsistent to me. It's functional though, but I wouldn't say great compared to my QtCreator experience of just very fluently typing out large amounts of code the way I want it.

zerr 4y ago
Why not KDevelop?
- smaudet 4y ago
  Kdevelop is/was good, it became unstable/unusable for a long time though when they upgraded KDE, though. Also, project file formats, e.g. if you have .vsproj or .pro files you can't always just use another IDE.

Rochus 4y ago

> the internal C++ parser limitations, e.g. poor 'auto' support I'm considering updating the internal C++ parser, which is written by Roberto Raggi, by a more recent version, but it's not my top priority.

arka2147483647 4y ago
I have read somewhere that it would be possible to use libclang to parse C++. I have no experience on this, but perhaps you should look into it?
- Rochus 4y ago
  Yes, there is even a clang plugin which I could migrate, but it - of course - requires clang and llvm, which is big and not particularly fast (as noted by AshamedCaptain).